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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

How to double the speed of your computer (RAID 0 + CLONE BACKUP)

We want fast computers! we want to press the start button and have our operating systems desktop in our screen within seconds, click on our folders and enjoy our music, pictures or home movies, open up our browser and visit our favorites!

But why do we have to wait for 40 seconds for our systems to be ready?, why does our system grind to a halt on the loading screen as if it was calculating quantum equations in the background, we invest a few hundred dollars in 4 or 8 cores, 8 gigs of the fastest ram, and still we have to wait for our HARD DRIVES to catch up to speed?

THE PROBLEM
We have come a long way from the dawn of computing, 300 mega hertz processors ,128 megs of ram and hard disks transfer rates of 30 megabytes per second, where enough, even USB 1.0 could only do 1.5 megabyte per second!

Soon after Gigahertz came along, for our processors our memory and our systems internal transfer rates, AGP evolved to Pciexpress, Chipsets and controllers exchanging gigabytes of data per second, but our hard disks stagnated for too long, transfer rates crawled from 33mB/s to 66mB/s, but still was not enough, Sure there existed better systems like SCSI, which could reach 300mB/s , but came with an astronomical cost, an option only for big company servers.

The old Parallel Ata interface, look at those big pins! limited at 133MB/s!

BABY STEPS TOWARDS SPEED
Recently We where introduced to SATA 1 which replaced thick ide cables, a standard that soon evolved to SATA 2 and the current SATA 3, Transfer rates reached Giga Bits per second , from 150MB/s , 300mB/s to 600MB/s

sata, so slim so simple and so fast!

Of course Hard drives themselves have to be designed to make use of the extra bandwidth, and the more you pay for a drive, the more speed you get, and you can opt for new Solid State Drives, which tout transfer rates of 250mB/s speeds or more, but shelling out 300$ for 128 gigs is still pricey today.

HOW I DOUBLED MY HARD DRIVES TRANSFER RATE

RAID is a technology that provides increased storage functions, either for increased reliability through redundancy, or increased speed trough the use of multiple drives multiplying the transfer rates, automatically and all shown to the system as a single hard drive.

Raid 0 has no (or zero) redundancy It provides improved performance as it joins two or more drives into a single one, it basically takes your data and divides among the hard drives in the array, writing and reading bytes in parallel, a 1 minute transfer is halved to 30 seconds on a 2 drive array, RAID 0 does not implement error checking, so any error is uncorrectable. More disks in the array means higher bandwidth, but greater risk of data loss.

Any other Raid method would provide security trough redundancy adding 1 or more drives to mirror, and or trace bit parity, but i wanted to keep things simple, 3 drives on my system was enough, and decided to opt for a RAID 0 + Clone backup solution!

Current Motherboards support limited RAID functions on their chip sets (raid 0 or Raid 1), opposed to costly raid add on controllers, with more than 4 or 6 sata connectors, after creating a RAID 0, with 2 new 500gigabyte hard drives, i was able to install windows 7 on a single 1 TB partition!

500 GB drive tops at 96 MB/s!

210 MB/s Average transfer rates! jackpot!

You can clearly see huge boost in speed from a single 500GB drive to the 1TB raid0 array, everything loads up at double speed!

IF YOU NEED INTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO CREATE A RAID 0 ARRAY, CHECK OUT THE ENCLOSED INTRUCTION VIDEO :D REMEMBER HARD DRIVES WILL BE WIPED AT CREATION OF ARRAY!

HOW TO SURVIVE RAID 0 FAILURE
All is good and working, but the risk of failure is doubled as now i rely on two hard drives, other raid options force me to rely on the motherboard chipset , and in the case of mobo failure, i might not even be able to access my data if i do not swap it with a similar mother board.

CASPER XP TO THE RESCUE
Enter Casper XP from future systems, it is a great tool for managing data CLONING on the fly, using system "snapshots" you copy your data to another hard drive without having to close or shutdown anything at all, you just need a hard drive as big or bigger than the drive you are trying to clone 1 terabyte hard drive in my case. (you can even use a sata drive in an usb adapter box!!)

The first time you clone your array it can take a while for you are copying everything, BUT the next time you clone the array, it will SYNCHRONIZE the backup drive to create a perfect BOOT ABLE MIRROR(on the same system), adding new or modified files, and removing the ones your deleted in your original drive. The upside to this is that in the case of Mother board failure you can quickly take the CLONED drive and plug it in another system and Access your files! You only need to keep the backup Synchronized, as often as possible, and i believe the latest version of casper does this for you!

Casper XP comes in the form of trial, and it will only copy your drive to another of the same size, with no resizing capabilities, but for the purposes of backup its the perfect free solution (unless the new trials are timed ones, i bought version 4.0 ages ago and works perfectly under windows 7)

this is the tale of how i doubled my drive's speed, halved load times, and managed to have a working copy of my system at all times, with the benefit of speed, redundancy and chip set freedom, of course you are never safe, and any of the 3 drives could fail so BACK UP TO OFFLINE MEDIA OFTEN!

windows and windows 7 trademarks belong to microsoft and its respective owners, casper xp belongs to future system solutions, this is a guide for educational purposes, and also an encouragment for people to BUY and PAY for software, seriously, if you use a program and like it SUPPORT their creators!

I've been thinking about getting myself into a raid config, but then again just like you mentioned, there is a higher risk... :( And I'm not really sure whether the extra speed is worth the extra risk...

I had RAID 0 on 2 HDDs for the last 2 years. Works perfectly, write and read speed is incredible, even performance in games has increased. No trouble with data loss so far. The only drawback might be the slight loss of space. I highly recommend that configuration.